Editor's Note: this piece contains adult content, as well as plot spoilers from Dishonored, Far Cry 3, and Darkness II.
If violence is inseparable from video games, sex may never have a major place in them. We can luxuriate in their animated encyclopedia of fantasies, but directly referencing sex apparently risks ruining the whole illusion. In 2012, games were less shy about introducing sex into their worlds, and yet most of the times it was left off in margins, something to catalyze a character's motivation or animate a bawdy background. But even as an intermittent presence it has a powerful and surprisingly broad range of effects.
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Max Payne 3's sense of sexuality was inseparable from its protagonist.
Max Payne 3's sense of sexuality was inseparable from its protagonist, a depleted stag who has traded his sexual optimism for alcohol and painkillers. His true love long dead, Max has migrated into a stage in his life where sex is something other people do. This is reinforced in a mid-game level where Max wanders into a brothel in a poor Rio neighborhood. The place is old and dirty and as Max works his way out of it, shooting at local gangsters, you'll see customers enjoying sexual play in the background. Even when surrounded by sex he is disengaged from it, resigned to the fact that human comfort and closeness are no longer possible for a man with his history.
There are a lot of games with brothels, but it's rare that players are allowed to do anything sexual in them. You can't have sex in Dishonored's brothel level but you can participate in some homosexual kink on your way to assassinate a pair of corrupt brothers in its upper chambers. In a side area you may or may not find, there is a rich government official blindfolded and strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to his body. When you enter the room he'll expect you to be a prostitute and not a masked assassin.
You're free to send painfully erotic bursts of energy through the old man's body, exploiting the time-honored tradition of powerful men becoming chatty gossips when in the company of their concubines. The scene is mean-spirited and seems to bait the player's disgust for this indulgent fetish that should be taken as an indictment of the ruling class. The bad guys are always the ones who take pleasure in being bad.
Hitman: Absolution's publicity campaign seemed to provoke anger at every turn this year, and a recent Facebook game to promote it was subject to intense criticism. The simple text game had players pretend they were assassins who could send brief messages to people in their friends list, choosing from an absurd list of hyper-superficial reasons to mark a person for death, including having small breasts, a small penis, or a flabby belly. Worrying about one's sexual or physical inadequacies undergirds huge swathes of American culture.
Hitman: Absolution
The game was live for less than a day before Square-Enix withdrew it for having underestimated the extent to which it might become weaponized in a culture as reactionary and competitive as America. Yet, the game is a reminder of just how much power and meaning we attach to other people's views of our bodies and sexuality.
The Wii U is probably not the first device that comes to mind when people think about sex in video games, but the Miiverse's ability to post messages and hand-drawn pictures is just as much a space for bathroom wall sex graffiti as it is a trading post for hints about the Level 5 boss in Mario.
Nintendo has gone to great lengths to ensure their machine is "child-safe," with a 2-step approval process for friends lists and vigilantly monitoring all Miiverse messages for "appropriate" content. While the company once made playing cards with naked women on them and operated a chain of "love hotels," the key to multinational success has been marketing to children, which means pretending sex doesn't exist.
Yet there is huge possibility between advertised uses and actual uses of a device. To wit, the Wii U's attached camera and video chat functionality can also be used as handy alternatives for Skype sexers. Nintendo is not promoting these qualities but they're certainly possible, and there really aren't any good reasons why two consenting adults shouldn't be able to use an entertainment device in a sexual way. The bigger cultural mystery is why we feel that sexual use of entertainment technology is inappropriate.
Wii U
Polymorphous Perversity is a 2D role-playing game made by Brazilian psychologist and sometime developer Nicolau Chaud. The game was built using RPG Maker 2003 and tells the story of a sexually disturbed hero who's been kidnapped into a strange world, where he must try to discover what is causing his sexual disorder.
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Polymorphous Perversity takes scandal and unease as its starting point.
Polymorphous Perversity applies the traditional structure of RPG combat to sex, with the man thrusting himself into naked women to deplete their hit points, while also draining some of his own. After successfully draining a woman's HP, she disappears from the game world, having "fulfilled her destiny," while the man levels up, allowing him to take fewer turns to successfully complete the sex act. Polymorphous Perversity takes scandal and unease as its starting point, rendering a view of sexuality -- male sexuality in particular -- as an inescapable obsession that transforms everything else in the game, even background shrubbery, which are disembodied penises swaying in the breeze.
Far Cry 3 dove into its own Freudian abyss with two sex scenes, the most bizarre of which comes at the game's end. After climbing into a hallucinatory island temple, you're given a mystic knife and told to kill your girlfriend, Liza. If you choose to kill her, players are magically transported from the corpse of one woman and into coitus with another, Citra, the local mystic, intent on bringing a horned demon god back to life.
Far Cry 3
As the player orgasms she claims his sperm has impregnated her with the demon's seedling. Then she kills our now useless hero. The events are nonsensical but they resonate with a Freudian model for fear wherein men mistrust their relentless sex-drives that will make them vulnerable to bestial succubi who only want to drain them of their precious life force.
It's easy to forget about the sweetness in all of this, but The Darkness II offers a simple and beautiful summation of why sex and -- more specifically -- physical intimacy in games are worth pursuing. In a mid-game flashback, the be-tentacled Jackie remembers an early moment in his relationship with the now-dead Jennie, visiting her at an empty diner where she was working the night shift. After a short conversation the two spend a wonderfully languorous three minutes dancing to the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You."
Jackie's involvement with the mafia, and his demon tentacles, would later lead to Jennie's murder, which frames the scene in postlapsarian gloom. Yet, interrupting the flow of blood and violence for a few quiet minutes of simply being close to another person without the need to fight or defend one's self is an excellent use of downtime. Minutes pass with players looking at the top of someone else's head as it lays against their chest. "I think about you every day, Jennie," Jackie says. "Every minute of every day." Ultimately it's not the ecstasy or the contorted pyrotechnics of sex that make it so unforgettable, but its role in holding two people together in time and place, each wanting to be as physically close to the other as possible.
The Darkness II
It can be so difficult to depict sexuality in video games. Games are supposed to carry us away from what we share with everyone else, creating a personal cocoon of experience built around someone else's creation. Sex makes the artifice of games apparent because many of us have some firsthand inkling of what is being depicted. We can see all the minute ways the simulation gets it wrong, flaws that are much less perceptible when the subject is tanks or creatures. It's still easier to animate a gun than a kiss.
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It's still easier to animate a gun than a kiss.
In 2012 it became slightly less absurd to imagine a time when developers might at last be able to render sex with the same care, thought, and creativity that they apply to violence. While we wait, you can head back out onto the battlefield. I'll be in the diner, slow dancing. Or maybe taking dirty pictures with my 3DS camera.
Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. Pictochat with him at your own risk or follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.
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